Category «Internet»

Librarians Face a Crisis of Violence and Abuse

The New York Times [unpaywalled] – As libraries become public stages for social problems – homelessness, drug use, mental health – the people who work there are burning out: “…Like Mr. [Mychal] Threets. [a supervisor at the Fairfield Civic Center Library in Solano County, Calif], librarians around the country are struggling to reconcile their desire …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Education, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election

ProPublica: Reporting Highlights Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish. Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences. …

Subjects: AI, E-Commerce, Health Care, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

Prebunking Elections Rumors: Artificial Intelligence Assisted Interventions Increase Confidence in American Elections

Mitchell Linegar, arXiv:2410.19202. 24 Oct 2024 – Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in the prebunking of election misinformation. Using results from a preregistered two-wave experimental study of 4,293 U.S. registered voters conducted in August 2024, we show that LLM-assisted prebunking significantly reduced belief in specific election myths,with these effects persisting for at least one …

Subjects: AI, Congress, Internet, Knowledge Management

Foreign Malign Election Meddling Persists but Struggles to Gain Traction

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD): “In September 2024, FDD published a report documenting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations targeting the 2024 U.S. elections. This follow-up report details the ongoing efforts of U.S. adversaries who seek to undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process in the weeks leading up to the November election. …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Defense, Internet, Legal Research, Social Media

Generative AI Will Increase Misinformation About Disinformation

LawFare – Speculation about disinformation by users and the media can generate harmful political effects, amplifying existing biases. “…AI is about to significantly increase uncertainty in disinformation research, in an already highly uncertain field. Disinformation operations will be harder to identify, harder to map out, and harder to attribute. People have a tendency to interpret …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

Why millions of Americans avoid the news and what it means for the election

Nieman Lab: “We are seeing a huge divide between people who are interested in news and those who are not, and I suspect that this divide is intensifying…Benjamin Toff is one of the leading experts on the rise of news avoidance and one of the authors of this recent book on this issue, based on survey data …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

15 Best Amazon Alternatives For Ethical Online Shopping

goodgoodgood [June 2022] Amazon, the company that catapulted founder Jeff Bezos to billionaire status (and to the edge of space), has long been touted as environmentally unfriendly; the company emits the same level of carbon emissions as the country of Norway, according to a report released by Amazon in 2019. Its impact on the environment, …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Commerce, Economy, Energy, Environmental Law, Internet